


Call Back Yesterday

by xenokattz



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: All the sadz, All the swears, F/M, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenokattz/pseuds/xenokattz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After 2005, the world went to shit. That was Logan's summary. Global climate change. All the TVs were rectangular and thin. All the cars were purportedly powered by electricity. The music sucked. Network explained events with more detail but the gist of it was after 2005, the world went to shit. And Remy had to fix it before he could go home to good old 1993.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stolen Futures

He rose from bed at the crack of noon. A cursory look in his hotel room revealed one last set of clean clothes: a pair of jeans and a patterned shirt he normally wouldn't be seen with outside of a laundry day. Which probably meant today was laundry day. Fortunately, he was in New York for a job and the hotel had laundry service.

His tiny fridge was empty, as were all his cupboards. He didn't know why he bothered to check; he subsisted on take-out and restaurant dining even at home. Bella left a message while he was out contemplating burgers versus an actual sit-down restaurant. Her dad was visiting so he needed to stay out of town for a while longer; Daddy dearest didn't like his daughter consorting with no gambling coonass. Remy decided to treat himself to a restaurant. Nothing like a good lager and halibut on steamed greens to make a man forget a non-girlfriend. One beer turned into three then a couple of shooters. 

_What was the saying? Beer before liquor you'll never be sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear?_ That was his last coherent thought.

When he opened his eyes again, beer and seafood spewed out of his mouth and up his nose. He bent over, coughing. He hated the sour smell of vomit. It was why he hardly overindulged. Someone heavy approached. Remy lashed out with his leg but his sense of balance was still skewed and he toppled on his side, barely missing his own puddle of guck. Vertigo sucked. Remy, who was especially attuned to his surroundings, found it doubly so. He decided motionlessness was a better option until the world turned itself right-side up.

"You gonna chuck up any more?" asked Logan. The Canadian's voice was unmistakable.

"Knew you missed me," Remy said. "Been, what, three whole years since you lost your mind on that island? A guy gets to thinking he ain't appreciated no more."

Logan laughed and it was a harsh sound. Harsh enough that Remy curiously opened his eyes.

Logan had half a face. It wasn't that half his head was cut off; his head was intact and head-shaped. However, the whole of the right side was a mash of tumour clusters completely obscuring his eye, ear and part of his mouth. What remained his right nostril had a metal ring stretching it open. His head was misshapen, bald in some areas, tufts of wiry black hair sticking out in others. The growths seemed to cover his entire body; his clothing stuck out in odd places. His right hand resembled a caveman's cudgel while his left still had separate fingers and claws.

"Jesus," said Remy, "I didn't think you could get any uglier."

"And I didn't think I'd actually want to see you again," Logan retorted. "You're the last person on our list."

"Damn, that's cold, bro."

"It's a damn cold world." He pointed to the cherriest television Remy had ever seen-- twice as wide as it was high and embedded into the wall with a picture so sharp it looked hyper-real. It was a real shame the images it showed were so damn depressing. The newscaster reported fifty miles of American shoreline lost to rising waters while the tickertape under her counted off numbers of dead from something called Legacy. Emaciated faced stared listlessly up at the screen, the kind Remy had only ever seen between televised Sunday sermons. The reporter said these were people in Spain. The tickertape continued to count off the day's dead: a thousand to Legacy, a hundred to a suicide cult, ten to landmines, twenty to a civil war. The date flashed at the top lefthand corner: May 6, 2013.

Remy shifted his stare back at Logan. "What the fuck?"

* * *

After 2005, the world went to shit. That was Logan's summary. His partner in crime, someone who called herself Network, explained with more detail but the gist of it was after 2005, the world went to shit. Remy's brief tour to the outside world confirmed it. Supposedly, they were in Upstate New York, more to the west, really but the unmistakable shores of the ocean lapped up against pseudo-Victorian townhouses. All the papers had the same date. All the TVs were rectangular and thin. All the cars were purportedly powered by electricity. The music sucked.

"I still don't get what I'm doing here," said Remy, "Hell, or how you pulled me out from twenty years ago to now. And if you tell me I'm a sort of Chosen One, I'm gonna demand a harem."

"Hardly," said Network. "You're the twelfth person we've taken from the past to attempt this mission."

"Oh."

"As near as we can surmise, the key events leading to this... dystopia was the unveiling of the Worthington anti-mutation gene therapy to the Alcatraz Attacks later in '05. Within that week, three key figures died: Scott Summers, Charles Xavier and Jean Grey."

"And you want me to save them," Remy guessed.

"Just Summers and Xavier. Grey has to die." Logan lit his cigar with a dented Zippo. Smoke curled around his head, a wonky halo.

* * *

Network's assistant, Doug, launched into a physics lecture that went in through one ear and out the other. Remy was more worried about the itty bitty microchip injected into his wrist. (When he got back to 1993, he was going to invest in computers; the damn things ruled the planet.)

"You're saying this thing," Remy pointed at the slight bump, "is my return ticket."

"Yes," said Network. "Objects from the past cannot last in the future. To you, this reality is only a possibility and therefore not real. Were you to remain for an extended amount of time in the possible future, your very molecules would fall apart. At least, that's the theory."

Remy reared back. "Hold up, now. The theory? You mean you ain't sure?"

Network only paused for a second but it was enough. 

"Okay, time the fuck out. You ain't sure if time travelling is bad for me but you're going to try anyway because eleven other people before me didn't seem to make a difference? I heard tell insanity is banging your head on the same wall over and over and expecting something different after each time."

A mite sulkily, Network said, "We have extensive notes from a collaboration between Dr. Reed Richards and Dr. Henry McCoy on the theory of time travel through the manipulation of pre-existing wormholes. During the Second Civil War, the hard drives were damaged. We've pieced together roughly seventy-five percent of their original research. It's enough for us to re-created the rest."

Doug launched back into his sci-fi babble. "As I was saying, wormholes are specific spots within space-time which creates a short-cut so to speak between two points--"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm more thinking about the part where you don't know if I could die from being in the future too long. That what happened to the people before me?"

"They couldn't do the job," Logan said. "The world's still shit."

"The world's always been shit; the trick's in manoeuvring around the floaters."

Wisely, Network interrupted the conversation before it escalated into physical aggression. "Think of space-time as a long, rough braid of rope made of mercury. An event in Point A, let's say 2005, will cause and event in Point B, here in 2013. That is the main line. Should one aspect of that event in Point A change, a strand splits from the mercury rope, becomes a separate entity but still follows the path to Point B. The farther back one goes or the greater the change in Point A, the more separate that mercury strand becomes, the further the mercury strand deviates until finally, it circumvents the event in Point B entirely."

"But that's all just a guess," said Remy.

"We do have the capability to see flashes of alternate dimensions parallel to this point in time," said Network., "My sister, Preview, is an interdimensional cognitive. She'll be tracking the deviances you create in space-time."

"Deviances?"

"Each new strand is an alternate dimension on its own until it meets with an event common to at least one other dimension during which time, the two strands meld together. Each time we sent someone back, they prevented the death of a different person yet the alternate dimension created from that change still resembles this one."

"And you're expecting me to be different."

"By trial and error, our proposal is the most logical solution."

Remy rubbed the bridge of his nose.

Logan snorted around his cigar. "What's the matter, Cajun? Chicken?"

"I didn't volunteer for this gig. You fucking kidnapped me through time and blackmailed me into doing this. Why the hell should I be the one anyway? I don't care about the X-Men, I got no stake in making sure they live or die."

"Which is exactly why you're perfect," said Network. "The closer one is to the major event, the less control they have over changing it. It's a variation on the grandfather paradox: If you go back in time to kill your grandfather as an infant, your father would not be born and therefore you would not be born to go back to change time. Likewise, if you change something in your past so that your present does not occur, you in the present cannot exist and therefore the past must have existed."

Remy dropped his head into his hands. "My brain fucking hurts. Did I mention I was hungover when you grabbed me out of my time?"

"You'd best sober up," said Doug. "We only have seventeen hours until the wormhole reopens. 0828 hours on the dot every day."

Remy never did like mornings.

* * *

"I was the first one who went back," Logan said. As if Remy really cared at this point; there were almost ten hours left until he got punted through time again. When he got back to '93, he was going to look for Logan specifically to kick his ass. His list of things to do in '93 was beginning to get fun.

"I went back five times before we finally accepted that no matter what I did, Jean, Scott and Xavier would always die. One way or another, before the end of '05, they'd die. So we tried a complete stranger--"

"Not complete," Network interrupted. "She was a private in my platoon but she had no other ties to the X-Men. She wasn't even a mutant."

"She got a bit farther. She actually killed Jean and kept Xavier from dying. Too bad the psychic backlash from that turned her into a psychotyrant himself. Global climate change and World War III still happened. We had to go back to square one."

The microchip itched. Remy rubbed at it gently, not wanting to damage his chances of going home. "Maybe the reason you can't change anything is 'cause it's meant to happen."

Logan growled. "You actually believe in shit like destiny?"

"I blow things up. I feel all the molecules all around me. I been yanked into the future like a taller, hotter Michael J Fox. Destiny's not much of a stretch after all that, hein?"

"If we can change one small aspect then we must be able to change it all," Network said. "With each successive re-entry into 2005, we change more and more and Novikov self-consistency principle is proven false."

"Whatever, Urklette. I just want you to make sure my ass don't turn into smoke." A though occurred to him. "What if I die back there? Is anything going to happen to the original me?"

"Do you mean a rupture in the space-time continuum?"

"No, I mean a rupture in my ass," said Remy. "If I die in 2005, is anything going to happen to me in 1993?"

"Of course not. Had you aged normally, your death in 2005 would not affect your life in 1993."

"But considering me-in-1993 aged to me-in-2005, wouldn't a displaced 1993-me in 2005 meeting 2005-me break something?" Remy shook his head. "I need another drink. I'm thinking a martini might do me right 'cause I think I understood what it was I just babbled."

"You don't have to worry about that," said Network. Near as Remy could tell, she was trying to be comforting. But Logan, walking off to the side, clenched his good hand open and closed, the claws clanking against each other. Tendons and deformed muscles writhed under his skin. Remy read body language like most people read headlines. They weren't telling him something, something that would get him dead. That was good and all; he didn't tell them that he had no intention of being an assassin.

* * *

You didn't just jump into a wormhole in a DeLorean, much to Remy's disappointment. Instead, they suited him up in a really heavy type of hazmat gear with a twenty-pound steel bucket for a helmet.

"I can't see out of this thing," he complained.

"Nothing to see," said Logan. "You didn't care when we brought you over."

"You stuck me in this thing and I didn't know?"

"Gumbo, you were so drunk, I could've stuck you in the bad end of a whale and you wouldn't care."

As if that wasn't claustrophobic enough, they led him into a sphere ten feet in diameter from the outside but only six feet on the inside. He sat in a bucket seat, about as comfortable as an old futon folded into a shopping cart.

"Remember: pay attention to the alarm in the microchip. You have less than seven days, only 150 hours, until the negative matter ring holding the wormhole dissolves," said Network. "Without a negative matter ring, you can't travel through a wormhole. You'll be trapped in the past."

"You mean the future," said Remy.

Network shrugged. "No matter what the point of view, you can't stay in 2005. You'll sicken within months, perhaps die in a year."

"I don't intend on staying for a year."

She nodded, pleased. "The wormhole will deposit you in this exact location in 2005. We know the following day, May 7th, Scott Summers will leave the school for Alkali Lake; Grey called him telepathically. When she rises out of the lake--"

Remy gestured the rest of the lecture away. "Yeah, yeah, I heard it the first twenty times. Summers gets his ass obliterated by his now-crazy girlfriend, she blows up Xavier next then goes with Magneto. A bit more recruiting on both ends and you got the Alcatraz Attacks. I'm supposed to keep Xavier and Summers alive and her dead."

"Do whatever it takes," said Logan. "I don't care if you have to stick them both in mental institutions for the next year, you keep Xavier and Summers alive. And don't forget to get all of this gear on and get into the sphere before you activate the tracer on your wrist," Logan said. "Activating it can pull your ass back through the hole but you'll be flattened to pieces if you go through naked."

"Sleep with the red-head _then_ kill her, gotcha," Remy said just loud enough for Logan to hear. Quick as lightning, the other man grabbed his wrist. His claws grazed his skin, raising welts.

"Do your job, Lebeau. Get in, fix the timeline, get out."

Remy touched one of the claws with two fingers. Energy crackled down the edge of the blade. "Touch me again, we get to see if you can heal from an amputated arm."

Logan laughed. He brought up his mutilated arm, the one that looked like a club. "How do you think this happened?"  



	2. Wormholes and Rabbit Warrens

May 6, 2005 greeted him with an ear-popping screech then a thud that bottomed his stomach out. His gut roiled. He had to get that helmet off now; he knew the spew force after time-travelling and it would be unbelievably noxious inside a helmet.

Remy fell out of the sphere, helmet pushed up to his forehead, in time to puke against a brick wall. After recovering from vertigo, he took a look around. The wormhole spat him out in an alley between a ramshackle building and a new development. The neo-Victorian townhouses he saw outside in 2013, he realised. In 2005, only the foundation had been excavated. The screech came from the gouged pavement under the sphere. Luck or fate kept the location empty for now.

Carefully, he removed the hazmat suit and the helmet, laying it out on the seat in such a way that would make donning it again easy. He pushed the door closed; the latch clicked, the hydraulics hissed. It might have been his imagination but he swore he heard the chip in his wrist ticking, counting down his 150 hours.

With the cash Logan stowed in his pocket, Remy rented a car to Salem City. Because it wasn't his money, he splurged on the latest model Ford Mustang. If he had to prevent the end of the world, he'd do it in style. Good thing too 'cause Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters looked like a summer cottage for the fucking Queen of England. Too bad the security didn't match.

He pressed a button on the intercom system beside the gate. "Can I help you?" asked a young female voice.

"I'm looking for either Charles Xavier or Scott Summers."

"May I please ask who this is?"

"The name's Remy Lebeau. Tell them it's real important life-or-death stuff."

He thought he heard her mutter "Like that's new" just before the gates beeped and swung open. 

The Mustang eased down the driveway, blending in as much as a swamprat like him stuck out. Hell with it. Remy jogged up the steps. The noises of a full home increased as he neared the door. He didn't have to wait long for someone to answer the doorbell. A gorgeous thing with Jessica Rabbit curves and a punky white streak for bangs met him on the other side. Every bone in his body went loose except maybe one. "Hello, chere," he drawled.

"Hi. Come into the study. I'll get one of them to come out." She opened the door wider, gesturing into the wide foyer. "Just go through those doors and I'll get you something to drink."

He smiled his thanks. "You a student here?"

"Yup," was her answer. She worried at her gloves, smoothing and tugging at the slight wrinkles. Since it wasn't that chilly outside and her body language screamed "Stay Away," he guessed her powers had something to do with touch.

"Wanna see something cool?" he asked.

"Depends. Are you gonna open your flasher jacket?"

He laughed. "Not hardly, chere. Lookit this." He palmed a card out of his sleeve and, with a twist of both hands, he made it appear between his index and middle finger. Energy hummed around the edges of the cardboard and along the lines of the ink. When it had the barest charge, he let it go. It cracked and smoked in midair. Ash showered his shoes. He showed his hands to her, shiny with scar tissue. "You do get a hang of it eventually."

She almost smiled as she stuck her hand out. "I'm Rogue."

"Remy." Stroking the base of her thumb, he added, "Please tell me you're about to graduate."

"Four more credits but I'm not eighteen until February. And I've got a boyfriend."

He clutched his heart. "Then I'm gonna have to live with the knowledge that I'm a dirty old man at twenty-two and hope that he treats you right until your birthday. After that, all bets are off and I'm gonna charm you away, hein?"

Smiling, she said. "You can try. And I might let you."

"You might let what?" Joe American entered the room, all coiffed blond hair and Colgate teeth. He put an arm around Rogue's waist. Ah. This was the boyfriend, looking like the last man a punky Jessica Rabbit would date. Remy sent her a look that asked "Are you for real?" which she answered with a frown. Huh. Love was truly blind.

* * *

Two sodas and a bag of chips later, Xavier finally called Remy into his office. That was all the time he needed to cement his strategy: Just tell 'em like it was. A telepath would peek in his head anyway to find the truth and if Logan's future ugliness didn't convince him, nothing would. 

The old man sitting behind the huge desk looked familiar but Remy couldn't quite place him. Maybe he robbed the guy at some point.

"You seem familiar to me as well, Mr. Lebeau," said Xavier.

Remy stiffened. "You gonna scrape my head this whole conversation? 'Cause believe you me, you'll have plenty of trouble doing that with explosives going at your nuts."

Xavier put his hands up in a sign of peace. "I only overheard what you have at the forefront of your thoughts. I consider it unethical to search thoughts without permission."

"Yeah, which is why you control people sometimes."

He nodded. "As a last option when I feel there is no other choice."

"You poking in my brain now?"

"I... believe that you believe you're time travelling."

"Exactly what I thought a shrink would say. Cards on the table." He fanned a deck in his left hand, then his right and back to his left before spreading it out in an X on the desk. With each point, he flicked a card over. "I don't wanna be here. I don't wanna be any part of no apocalypse. I just want to go home, get a girl, get a magnum of champagne and steal a Lamborghini, in no particular order. But this here--" he pointed at the chip at his wrist-- "tells me I gotta play along with the voices you think are all in my head. So do me a favour: Lock Summers up, send Logan on over to Canada instead and make sure he uses those claws to separate her head from her shoulders. You do it right now, we all get happy except Grey who gets dead. Again."

At the end of his monologue, the cards facing up showed a royal flush.

"You'll forgive me if I ask for proof," said Xavier.

"Hell, I don't know. Logan said Grey was calling Summers back to Canada. Man thought he was going nuts, hearing her voice in his head. Maybe that's why he's shut up in there."

Xavier looked pensive. He closed his eyes momentarily and Remy had the impression that no one was home right now. He looked around. Some of the books on those shelves had to be first editions. A statue near the window looked like an authentic Henry Moore; would be hard to carry out though. There had to be lighter pieces around the house, stuff that would fit in the sphere.

"Scott's mind is closed to me." Remy snapped his attention back to Xavier, back in his body. "He has some mental shielding; it forms naturally when surrounded by telepaths. But he shouldn't have to strength to keep me completely locked out."

"There you go. She's got her evil psychic claws in him."

"I'm afraid it's not that simple."

"Sure it is. Logan kills things; it's what he does and he's damn good at it. Tell him the kids'll die if Grey lives, point him west by northwest and let things happen."

Xavier threw him a look of admonishment. It would have worked if Remy actually gave a shit about school. "Logan and Dr. Grey were very good friends. It would be very difficult for him to hurt her."

Remy rolled his eyes. "Jesus fucking wept, you gotta be kidding me! Like that ever stopped the Wolverine."

"I would appreciate it if you didn't refer to Logan's fighting abilities as his only worth."

"It ain't?"

"We believe otherwise," said Xavier. "Now, please, I must speak with the staff about this. You're welcome to take a room here. Otherwise, Salem City has a comfortable inn less than ten minutes' drive away."

He got the message: We think you're crazy as fuckbugs but we'll play along until we call the men with the white jackets. He could wait one more day in 2005. All the better to case the joint.

* * *

The problem was Remy liked kids. He genuinely liked the little guys and couldn't help but look for Network in the clump of hyperactive arms and legs surrounding the Playstation in the rec room. She had to be a teenager here; he placed her at mid-twenties in 2013. He shifted his attention to the foozball deck. Rogue was there with the Mutant Ken doll, a gumchewer in a micro mini and a guy who could probably benchpress a Volkswagon Combi without breaking a sweat. The gumchewer was the right age and had some Asian in her but she didn't look like Network. The rest of the students in the area were too young.

A skinny little freckle climbed on his lap while he played with his cards. "Can you do magic tricks?"

"Can I do magic tricks? Ma 'ti, I am a wizard."

"Like Harry Potter?"

He blinked. "Who?"

She stared at him, aghast. "You don't know Harry Potter?"

"Uh. Course I do. He's a wizard."

She beamed and nodded, crisis averted. "Show me?"

Cutting the deck in half, he flicked it up into the air in controlled arcs so they shuffled into each other at the peak of the arcs. The trick garnered "ooooh's" from the other little ones and they crowded around him, game console forgotten. He performed two other complicated shuffles before fanning the deck out. "Pick a card."

Until the dinner bell rang, he was the entertainment. Even the high schoolers wandered in, pulling the smaller ones on their laps for a better view. Rogue stood near the back, arms hugging her own waist. A smile played on her lips.

"That was real nice of you," she told him as they left for the fining hall. "Ever since... well, it's been a while since the kids laughed."

"What's it going to take to make you laugh?" he wanted to know.

She shook her head. "Give it up, Remy."

"Never. Too much fun teasing a smile outta you."

"Boyfriend," she reminded him.

"Adds to the fun. I steal you away while he ties his shoe laces."

"As if I'd let you." Before he could retort, she sashayed to her chair in the dining room and out of earshot. He'd miss her in '93, that was for sure; her and her Jessica Rabbit body.

* * *

As predicted, Summers popped out of his room the next morning with a pack slung over his shoulder. Under heavy questioning from Xavier, Logan and Remy, he admitted to hearing Jean call to him.

"I just need to see," said the poor sap. "I won't do anything."

"If she can call you from a thousand miles away, she can make you do whatever it takes to resurrect her," said Remy. "Let Wolverine go."

Summers' lips thinned to a white line. He leaned away from Logan, just the slightest bit, and his nostrils flared like he smelled something foul stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Ah, so there really was tension going on in there. From how Logan avoided eye-contact, Remy was pretty sure Grey cheated on Summers and Summers knew it. Talk about your fucked up relationships.

"We're supposed to take this psycho's word that Jean's alive and she'll bring around the end of the world? Come on!" Logan crossed his arms, glaring.

"I took your word," said Remy.

Xavier said, "To be safe, I'd like Logan and Ororo to go to Alkali Lake. If what Remy says is true, then we would have prevented a disaster. If not, no harm done. Scott, I'd like your permission to enter your mind. This entity, whoever it is, has targeted you and for your own safety, we need to study it and reinforce your mental shields."

Summers sulkily consented.

"Funky. My job's here's done." Remy clapped his hands together. "It's been a slice, y'all, but I got places to see and people to do back in '93. I'm gonna head back to my magic ball and try to get home before the big, bad Armageddon trashes my ticket back."

* * *

Remy wasn't expecting a parade (okay, maybe a small party) but he didn't think his return to 2013 warranted a left hook from Logan's gimpy hand. "What the _fuck_?!"

"We told you to kill Grey!" Logan roared.

"I did!"

"No, you fucker, you told them to kill her. Do you really think the X-Men would kill?"

"How did you know--"

"Preview told us. She looked into that fucking alternate dimension, you goddamn cheat."

"Those X-Men had you in the roster," said Remy. "By the way, thanks for telling me you were screwing Grey behind Summers' back. That wasn't uncomfortable at all."

"I never touched her."

"That wasn't the vibe I got."

"Considering I first found you surrounded by hookers, I'm not surprised your brain would go straight to the gutter." Logan exhaled a great cloud of smoke. "You have to kill her when she's helpless because I can't. Not me when I'm at that time and not me time travelling."

"I ain't an assassin."

"You're going to have to be."

"Fuck you." Remy threw his gear into the sphere. "Find some other idiot to puppet. I'm going home."

Trembling slightly, Network stood in front of the sphere and said, "You can't."

Remy's eyes lightened to red. "You gonna want to step away, chere."

"We control the sphere. We can send you wherever we want."

He snatched her wrist tight and twisted. "Or you could send me to '93 before I charge your clothes. See if you can change out of it before it explodes."

"You said you didn't kill."

"I didn't say nothing about maiming." Energy bled through the threads of her shirt.

"We can just keep you here for a year. You'll still die if you don't get back to your time and the longer it takes you to do what we want, the sicker you're going to get." The words came out in a panicked rush as Remy continued to charge her clothes. "Wolverine!"

Feeling several sharp angles whistling towards his head, Remy ducked, spun and pulled on Logan's leg. The other man toppled back but recovered quickly. By this time, Remy had Network in a headlock.

"I ain't kidding about blowing her shirt up."

"And we aren't kidding about letting you die," said Logan. "Go ahead. Blow her up. We don't have a lot of hospitals around here any more, especially not for mutants so it'll take at least half a year for her to recover. By that time your hands and feet lose feeling except for a bit of tingling. Then, while she decides whether or not she wants to punish you for making he go through months of pain, you'll get sicker and sicker. The time-fade's kind of like Parkinson's disease; you slowly lose control and sensation of your body from the outside in until you're barely a working brain inside a paralysed body. We can keep you until you're trapped in your body. At that point even if we returned you to 1993, you'd be too damaged to recover fully."

Remy gritted his teeth. "How do you know that?"

Logan showed off his teeth as well. "After twelve tries, we know."


	3. Damned for Caring

The three Logans puzzled Remy. There was the Logan he met back in '90, the one he called Original Logan. That man was set for blood, no mistake, and it was obvious he knew how to spill it. But there was a weary honour to his anger, a penitent Lancelot avenging the death of Guinevere. 

Logan in 2005, mentally tabbed X-Logan, seethed with confused anger. Something or someone in the school soothed it to the point where Remy wasn't the least bit afraid of him. X-Logan would think twice before stabbing. He might even run from a fight if it meant protecting the students.

Then there was Logan of 2013, Doomsday Logan. The man scared the shit out of Remy because that man had nothing to lose. His desperation outlined every sinew in his deformed body. He was willing to die for his mission and he didn't care who had had to kill and what the collateral damage. What could have flipped X-Logan's mellowness so completely upside-down?

* * *

Hazmat suit, forty pound helmet, big metal sphere, wormhole, puke. Remy went through the second time and the vertigo worsened. He barely got the sphere open this time. Vomit dribbled down inside the hazmat suit. Dragging himself out of the sphere, he shakily got to his feet. The sphere made a nice solid surface to prop up against. He stayed there for a few minutes, filling his chest with air.

To keep things simple, he went to the same rental place to get the same Ford Mustang and drove the same way. He couldn't enjoy the view this time, preoccupied with assassination methods. It wasn't his forte. The way he saw it, there was no chance in hell he'd be able to kill someone who could remake the world on the atomic level. Only by sheer luck did Logan manage to stab her and even then, Grey's inexperience with her powers allowed him to heal. Doomsday Logan told him about dimensions with whole cities recreated according to her whim and entire planets consumed by her hunger.

* * *

Damn but Rogue made all of this time travel bullshit kind of all right. Even if he couldn't touch, that first sight when she opened the door blew his weariness away.

"Come into the study. I'll get one of them to come out." She opened the door wider, gesturing into the wide foyer. "Just go through those doors and I'll get you something to drink."

He stuck his hands in his pockets. "How long until you graduate?"

"Just one semester," was her answer. She smoothed the wrinkles from her gloves then crossed her arms. The "Stay Away" sign lit up in neon.

"Good luck with that."

"With what?" And there he was, All American Mutant Ken, Bobby Drake, with his spiky hair and his arm around Rogue's waist.

"I was telling Remy that we graduate high school at the end of the semester," she said.

"Yeah, cool, huh? Are you in college right now?" asked Drake.

Remy shook his head. "I found work straight out of school." Which was true; he jacked cars expertly by the age of thirteen and dropped out of formal schooling before he turned fifteen. The only good to come out of The Island were the books the soldiers and scientists brought in.

He told the Xavier the same story as before and, like before, the old man insisted on waiting until the next day before he stopped Summers from heading out the door.

"You say the last time you tried to change time, you were unsuccessful because you didn't personally see to Jean's death. Do you intend to go to Alkali Lake yourself?" asked Xavier. Summers, Logan, McCoy and Munroe surrounded him, in matching poses of distrust. Since blunt truth didn't work last time, Remy went for charm.

"I know y'all still recovering from her death. From the sound of it, she was everyone's big sister, hein? What I'm saying ain't matching to what you know of her and, hey, I'd love to be wrong. All I'm asking is for you all to wait and see. If she don't come out, then I'm crazy and you can poke my brain until it's right again. If she come out good, we throw a welcome back party. She come out bad--" He did his best to look apologetic, "-- you gotta let me do what I was sent here to do. It ain't just my life, it's at least a hundred other people she's gonna destroy."

"Jean wouldn't do that," said Summers.

"Boy, no one hopes you're right more than me."

* * *

Logan volunteered to show him to a room which, knowing what little he did of both Original Logan and Doomsday Logan, put Remy on the edge. Best case scenario, he'd threaten to cut off his balls; worst case, he'd make good on the threat. You never could tell with the Wolverine.

To his surprise, Logan was chatty. "What did you do after the Island?"

"Went back to New Orleans to grab my stuff. Flew over to Cancun and laid low for a while in case Stryker got whiff of me. Damn but that's a pretty place. Bikinis far as the eye can see."

"A lot of tourists with fat wallets."

He shrugged, nice and easy. "True enough. At the tables or on the street, makes no matter to me. Credit cards are where it's at now. I got a good connection; they skim a dollar from a couple thousand people every month or so. Keeps me out of the water between jobs."

"And you stay untraceable." 

"Mais sho'. SSN's mean government records and swear by my good looks and towering ego, Stryker has access to those."

Logan whipped around. "You know Stryker?"

"Yeah." Remy glanced down at Logan's forearms. His claws slithered under his skin, ready to emerge.

"How?"

"I know you got shot bad back on the Island but you ain't remembered yet?"

"Cajun, I can't remember a damned thing before I woke up with your ugly mug staring down at me."

Remy let out a laugh. "I didn't know you felt like that about me, cher."

"Fuck that. Seeing you was probably what traumatised me." But he started to crack a smile.

The man was too proud to ask but Remy read desperation in his stance. So he told Logan what little he knew of his history over a couple beers. All right, so he skipped the bit about the elbow to the face and the fire escape. "None of this is lighting any bulbs, is it?"

"No," said Logan. "I get bits and pieces when I dream but it never stays around long enough."

"Lucky man." At his disbelieving snort, Remy said, "I like rum as much as the next person but I wish to God I didn't need it to forget. Stop looking or you could find Stryker looking back."

"Stryker's dead."

Ah. Hard to believe when Remy still felt a bull's eye between his eyes. "Did you make him suffer?"

"I didn't make it quick."

"Good."

* * *

Nothing happened for the rest of the day. May 8th was equally boring. By lunchtime on May 9, Remy began to believe maybe he _was_ crazy but he felt the chip under his skin, ticking away. The twenty-first century had much to recommend it. MP3 players were the best of these, immediately followed by twenty-four hour gourmet coffee shops and high-definition digital television. On the downside, Kurt Cobain was dead, restaurants forbade smoking indoors and there was nothing on TV except reality shows.

Summers went out of his way to die. Well, okay, maybe that was just Remy's interpretation of the events but when a man tailed him on a bike, going at 100 mph on winding country roads without a helmet, he got to thinking. As far as he knew, Summers' optic blasts couldn't protect his fool head from cracking. Remy leaned into a hairpin turn. His elbow skimmed the asphalt. Was it just him or did his microchip tick louder?

They shrieked to a stop at a strip mall. Remy yanked his helmet off, his teeth clenching as he dismounted. "What the fuck, Summers?"

The other man rolled his shoulders meaninglessly. "We need to pick up bathroom supplies."

"We coulda done that four strip malls ago."

"I like this mall."

"Bullshit. You're trying to make my job harder than it need to be."

"Gosh, you think so?" Damn those shades of his anyway. Summers held himself as still as... well, as still as Remy himself and he couldn't read a thing from his body language.

"I'm just trying to keep you alive."

"And keep Jean dead," Summers shot back. "That's not exactly going to put you in my good books."

"You really want an evil zombie girlfriend?"

He went all up in Remy's face. "Want to say that again?"

"Okay. Tasteless, yeah, but considering she's going to go psycho and kill you when she comes back, I think you're protecting her too much."

"Don't use that word."

Nonplussed, Remy asked, "What word?"

"Psycho. Jean has-- had-- a chronic mental illness. It's the same as having diabetes or allergies. She went to therapy and took medication. She had good days and bad days but it was under control. Calling her a psycho is the same as calling her a mutie and expecting her to kill people because it's 'in her nature'."

The shop doors slid open. Summers grabbed a plastic basket, stalking forward as though Remy wasn't beside him.

"Did you know she was like that when you got together?"

"Why do you care?"

"I'm a curious kinda cat."

"Scientists don't name their lab rats because they know they'll have to be destroyed at the end of the experiment. You're helping us buy toilet paper and disposable razors."

That statement gave Remy a pause. He understood what Summers was getting at and he was right. But he couldn't help himself. Remy liked people. He liked to know people, talk with them, watch them, figure out how they tick. A place like Xavier's? A time like this? Might as well let a preschooler loose in a candy shop and tell him not to eat.

"So, you got with her before or after you knew she was sick?" He was going to shoot himself in the foot this time around. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time.

* * *

When he wasn't babysitting Summers or checking up on Xavier, Remy hung around the younger students. They were fun, them, all giggles and shrieks. They played dodgeball and kicked his ass in Super Mario Galaxy.

"You're good with them," said Munroe. "Have you got children of your own?"

"Naw, not one anyone's told me about. 'Course, I travel a lot. You don't happen to have any unbearably cute _possedès,_ 'round twelve to sixteen years old?"

"I'm afraid at that age, most children act as though they're possessed."

"Co', they can't all be mine. I ain't that big of a slut." He winked even as he bent down to carry Sarah, a tiny thing who'd become his tail since his arrival. She snuggled into his neck, her horns scratching up his neck. He flipped up his jacket collar over the spot. 

Munroe struggled against her smile. "I doubt that. Do all females fall in love with you or just the ones within a ten foot radius?"

"Why you ask? Is it working on you?"

She rolled her eyes. " Try not to get too attached. You may not be able to do your job." Her disapproval stiffened her stride as she walked away. She liked him about as much as Summers. Probably was Grey's friend. Then again who wasn't Grey's friend around here? From what he could tell, she was a step down from the Virgin Mother.

Sarah stuck out her arm for his perusal. "Remy, I breaked my arm." Sure enough a bone spike that had been there this morning was just a stub now, oozing lymph.

"Ah, honeychild, you all right? It don't hurt none?"

"Nuh-uh."

"You just saying that 'cause you're brave." He kissed her temple and smoothed her hair.

"Remy, what's your job?"

* * *

The students didn't know anything about Grey's supposed resurrection. Instead, current gossip centred on Worthington Pharmaceutical's anti-mutation therapy, marketed as The Cure. Remy snorted. Robert Smith couldn't be too happy with that trademark violation.

"What do you think about it?" asked Jubilee. She and the rest of the senior students sat in the second floor study, books askew on all the desks although Remy ha yet to see actual studying.

He winked. "You just trying to get me to answer your ethics homework."

"No really!"

He noticed Rogue lean forward to listen to his answer just as Bobby leaned back, turning his embrace in an awkward pull on her shoulder. 

"I think everyone's gotta make that choice on their own then live with the consequences," he said. "'Don't put much trust anyone who sells a cure to the highest bidder, me. 'Cause that's exactly what I would do."

The solemnity dissolved into laughter for everyone except Rogue who bit her bottom lip. Remy found her foot under the table and nudged it lightly. Her eyes widened. He nudged her again, this time by stepping lightly on her toes. Suppressing a grin, she pulled away. She was fixing to get the Cure, he realised. He didn't blame her, knowing what he did about her power. People needed touch. She had to be aching for human contact.

And damn but he had to stop that train of thought right there. He might be only three years older physically but chronologically, he was being a pedophile. How old would he be in '05? Thirty-seven? And her only seventeen. That was just wrong. Maybe in another lifetime.

They sat together out on the roof, him and Rogue, every night now since his arrival. (His second arrival. This time travelling thing was going to give him a headache.) 

"It gets so stuffy in there, y'know? Everyone crowds. They don't even realise it. It's like there's no such thing as personal space any more." She picked at a thread on the tip of her gloved fingers.

"I don't mind the noise some. Every time I light up around there, Xavier tells me he's gonna turn me into a six year old girl."

She laughed. "He says that to Logan, too."

"Hein. Last thing I need is more in common with him." He flicked at his cigarette. "You don't mind none, do you?"

"I don't like the smell and I think what you're doing to your lungs is disgusting but it's a free country. Suck in as much cancer as you want."

"Thanks, chere."

"Don't mention it."

Heat from the daytime leaked from the roofing tiles. Apparently, the weather was unusually warm but Remy rarely felt heat. Part of his mutation, he reckoned. He zipped his jacket to his neck, the cigarette flopping at the corner of his lip. Ash flecked his sleeve. 

Down in the garden, Drake froze the fountain for Pryde. He shaped blades on the soles of his shoes, took her hands and twirled her around. They laughed and didn't look up.

"High school sucks," said Rogue.

"Glad I dropped out."

"You say that pretty casually."

"Hein, the way I talk and dress, my job or the lack thereof, all pretty much declare to the world that I'm a no-good coonass. Don't see the point denying it."

"I'm sorry."

"Why? Folk're fine 'round the card table or in the nightclubs but in all other ways, I'm invisible. And I like that all right; makes it easier to bilk 'em dry."

"So why are you up here with me when you could be downstairs with everyone else?" she asked pointedly.

"Maybe I like the company."

"Bull."

Lightly, not wanting to spook her, he sought out the prominences of her spine through her knitted top. She didn't turn but she didn't pull away either, her eyes stayed on the two figures skating below. He knew, well as he knew the docks of New Orleans, her attention wasn't on them. 

"I'm going to take the Cure as soon as I graduate," she said. The silence amplified her every breath and the creak of his leather sleeve. Her lashes fluttered every time he circled the bump between her shoulder blades. She tensed when he dipped into the small of her back. She didn't lean any closer but neither did she pull away. He sat there with her, touched her, long after Drake and Pryde re-entered the house. 

* * *

This was how Logan went hard, became Doomsday Logan back in 2015. Living with these folk, especially the kids, having them around you, keeping you warm then losing them. Did Grey kill the kids when she went on her rampage or did their deaths come afterward? What changed the face of the planet? What was Legacy and how did it kill thousands at a time in tickertape news, like football scores. How did someone who healed from anything, with bones harder than diamonds, turn into a B-film monster?


	4. Pieces of Cinnamon and Roses

This is how life as Remy knew it ended.

May 11, 2005. Somehow, Magneto and his merry band of mutant guerrilla fighters found Grey who was undead just like Remy said she would be. They marched east towards New York. What Magneto didn't crumple, Pyro burned and Phoenix dissolved. It was real hard not to say "I told you so."

The price of his restraint? They dragged Remy into the Jet along with the X-Kids to stop the army. Even Xavier went, leaving the house and the remaining students to McCoy, a senior student named Neal Sharra and Worthington's kid, Warren. Ten of them against at least a hundred angry mutants and the National Guard, and Remy without an escape hatch. This couldn't end well.

"They've crossed the border. Idaho is reporting damage in the millions," Cyclops called out to the back.

"There go this year's supply of fries," Remy said. He shuffled his cards.

"Don't you take anything seriously?" Bobby bit out.

"Not if I can help it, cher." The cards spiralled over his head, each one landing, perfectly of course, in his empty hand.

"Oh yeah, worrying could give you wrinkles."

"Gotta keep pretty for the sugar mommas."

They barely made it over Pennsylvania airspace when the whole cabin groaned. Remy's attention snapped to the cockpit.

"That wasn't a good sound," said Bobby.

Logan swore creatively, continuously and loudly.

"Neither is that," Jubilee pointed out.

The jet moaned again accompanied by shuddering and clacking panels.

"Fucking _planes_." Logan gripped his armrests tightly enough to leave dents.

The world turned upside-down and for a couple seconds, Remy thought somehow the wormhole caught him up again but everyone else's screams and the acrid smell of gasoline put that theory to rest. The plane flipped and twisted, pitching Remy's kinaesthetic sense right into a blender.

"Hold on for emergency landing!" Cyclops shouted through the PA system.

"You can _land_ like this?!" Logan shouted back.

The plane nosedived, still twisting. The combination of g-forces and spin was too much for Remy. His eyes rolled back.

* * *

He came to, intact but with God's own migraine thumping against his brain case. Lord help him if he puked; he _really_ hated puking.

"That's it, me and flying are obviously not meant to be," he heard Rogue say, "unless I absorb Superman's powers. You awake, Remy?"

"Yeah. Wish I wasn't though." He turned over onto his back. "Shit, girl, how'd we survive that?"

"Cyclops can land anywhere," said Bobby, loyal as ever.

"The problem is he can't land in one piece," said Logan.

Summers flipped him the finger. "You're welcome."

"Is everyone all right?" Xavier sent the message verbally and telepathically and the latter was never going to stop being creepy in Remy's opinion.

"My side really hurts," said Rogue. "It hurts to breathe."

Bobby rushed to her side. "Let me see." A panel off the plane slammed into him before he could stand.

"They're here!" Munroe cried out.

The war began.

* * *

Remy had no intention of hanging around and getting dead. No, sir, he wanted out of there as soon and as unhurt as possible. But he had to make sure Grey got offed and he had to do it without catching her attention because people in her line of sight had a bad habit of turning into dust. Problem was he couldn't figure it out. As Phoenix, Grey was Fort Knox, the White House and a nuclear warhead silo smushed into one hot package. 

This was why Doomsday Logan couldn't change the timeline. She was too powerful. The minute Xavier and Summers made their move, they'd turn into ash and there was nothing Remy could do about it.

However, Summers evidently thought the power of his fucking hard-on _could_ do something about it. He broke out of rank to stand in front of the Phoenix.

"Jean!" he yelled. "Jean, it's me!"

Remy took a knee to mutter, "She knows you who are, idiot. Don't mean she won't dust you." Another three mutants charged him, yanking his attention from the ensuing drama. He was tiring out, charging took longer and his hits weren't as effective. How long had they been fighting? Magneto's army seemed never ending. Besides that fool Summers, he had no idea where everyone else was or even if they were alive. Fuck Doomsday Logan and his wart-ridden face anyway.

Summers kept jawing, kept heading straight for point zero. "Jean, I know you're in there. Please, talk to me!"

They were determined to make this hard! Kill the unstoppable force, save the stupid boyfriend and the old man in a wheelchair in the middle of a battlefield. Remy took a cleansing breath before running out of his nice, safe hidey-hole. All the better the yank that fool in love out of the line of fire.

"What do you think you're doing?" Summers demanded.

"Saving your life," Remy said. "My ticket out of here remember?"

"To hell with you! That's my wife!"

"No, that's the crazy person in your fiancée's body."

"I can get her back."

"Then you as crazy as she is. What good are you to anyone dead, hein?"

Summers' lips tightened, the furrow between his brows deepening. Remy started to cajole some more but stillness dropped over the other man's body. The lines from his forehead smoothed and the tension in his shoulders visibly loosened. "You're right," he said.

"I... am. Sho'."

"Because of her telepathy, her awareness is through the roof but she can get distracted. It's the nature of her condition. We need her occupied." Summers looked away. A second later, Xavier's voice reverberated in Remy's head. ::I'm here, Cyclops. Everyone is telepathically connected as you instructed.::

::Good,:: said Cyclops and whoa this who brain talking thing was crazy. ::Professor, we all need to be telepathically shielded as well as possible, as close as shut out as you can make it against the Phoenix. I know that'll take a lot of concentration so Shadowcat, you're in charge of keeping him safe. Stay in contact with him, stay intangible. Everyone else, attack her in twos, guerrilla-style. Keep the other soldiers and mutants away if you can but the focus is keeping each other alive and clearing the way for Wolverine. Wolverine, you have to stay in her line of sight more than the rest of us. She has to think you're the main attack front.::

::Who is it really?:: asked Logan.

::Me. Through the professor.::

::Remy told us she has the ability to control your blasts,:: said Munroe.

::Not if she's sedated.:: Summers turned to Remy and held up two cardboard packet of pills. ::You're the thief. I need you to steal injectible versions of Jean's meds from the clinic. This is olanzapine. This is risperidone. They'll probably come in powder form so grab a bottle of water, along with syringes and needles. Big needles.::

::Try to find some pentobarbital as well,:: added Xavier. ::A combination of physical sedation and antipsychotic therapy ought to slow her down.::

::Olanzapine, risperidone, pentobarbital, needles, water,:: Remy repeated.

::Storm, give him cover,:: said Summers. ::Shadowcat, you'd better be with the professor right now. Everyone else, fall out!::

Heartily glad to be out of the major fire fight, Remy blew a hole into the building instead of picking the lock. Hey, not like anyone would notice considering everything else was blowing up. He grabbed the nearest flunky and threw her up the wall, his bo against her neck. "Tell me where you keep the antipsychotics."

"Th-third floor."

"And the stairs are?"

"Around the c-corner. T-to the r-right."

"Thanks, chere. Just for the record, it ain't for me."

She didn't look like she believed him. Another handful of cards cleared the hallway security on the way to the stairs. Screams and a loud bang shook the walls. Gun-toting cowboys poured out of the woodwork. Remy flattened himself in a doorway, letting the canon fodder go to their doom. Fewer people in his way to the meds.

The storage room was empty. Boxes in shrink-wrap lay in low stacks of five. Remy quickly scanned the stickers on the front. By the seventh stack, he caught gold: risperidone. Drawing a knife from his belt, he ripped the box open and took a couple boxes. The next stack over held olanzapine; he took the same number. Next, to find needles and water.

::Gambit,:: Cyclops' voice shattered his concentration.

::Do _not_ do that again without warning.::

::We're a little strained out here. You'll have to mix and draw the medication yourself.::

::Sure, 'cause I go medical training.::

::Only olanzapine has to be reconstituted. Use the syringe to put ten millilitres of water in the container; sterile saline if you can find it but water will have to do if you can't. Shake the bottle like orange juice then draw out two millilitres into each syringe.::

::Yeah, yeah, I can figure it out. Just make you y'all're in fit shape to give it to her 'cause there's no chance in hell I'm getting close enough to give her the shot.::

He found the clinic by looking for the most lab coats running then going back the way the came. The jackpot room wielded shelves of syringes, needles, sterile saline and sedatives. A soldier double-backed, catching him as he entered the room. Remy slammed the business end of his bo in the man's nose, whirled around to smack him again on the head then kicked his kidneys for good measure. The soldier's piece clattered to one side. Remy picked it up, clicked the safety on and stuffed it behind his back. Just in case.

He drew and capped each med steadily; he'd lied about his past experience with the stuff. Back on the Island, he charmed some of the doctors into letting him help in the clinic in exchange for good behaviour. He'd learned schedules that way. There were different colours of masking tape, too. Remy wrapped the antipsychotic needles in red and the sedatives in blue.

Outside, the island looked more like Armageddon than ever. Remy waited for Summers' tell-tale red optic blasts before charging out into the battlefield. Thankfully, the man wasn't too far away. He used upturned trucks and chunks of wall as cover.

"Special delivery," he panted, landing beside Summers. He held the syringes out.

Summers plucked half of them then said, "Give the rest to Wolverine. He'll be the backup."

"'Cause it's so easy to run across a battlefield ." But he hauled ass 'cause talking got you killed when an all-powerful telekinetic was bent on world domination.

Logan needed a little more explanation about the medication. "I'd feel better if we had those Cure guns to fire instead of having to get close to her."

"You ain't; Summers is."

"That boy's gonna get himself killed."

"That's why you're Plan B."

He almost laughed. "That's his plan? How'd he end up team leader?"

"I figure he got it since he looks the best in them tight leather pants."

Logan did a double-take. "LeBeau, if I die with the mental image of you and Summers bumping uglies, I'm going to fucking haunt you for the rest of your goddamn life."

"Aww, jealous, cupcake?" He rolled away before Logan could come up with a retort.

At that exchange, everything blurred into a fog of explosives, chunks of dirt and a low level roar that could have been the ocean or the armies. Remy stopped processing anything more until he spotted Summers flinging himself at Grey, his arm bent back. She began to turn. Remy threw handfuls of charged gravel at her. Simultaneously, Logan ran at her, roaring. Summers sank a syringe in her upper thigh. Shrieking her displeasure, she shook him off before he could inject the second. Rasputin came to his teacher's rescue. Logan slammed the other needle in her other leg. This time, Grey kicked him off, sending him nearly off the Island.

::It's not enough,:: Remy overheard Summers think.

Munroe cried out, ::Scott, don't!:: but Summers had already popped out of his foxhole, a syringe in each hand. Grey turned. She raised her hands. Ocean water, already forming an unnatural twenty-foot wall around the island, proceeded to boil away. Summers flicked his visor open. His optic blasts nearly pushed Grey back but she caught herself and raised a hand to ward the beams away. She didn't see him thumb the caps off the syringes. She couldn't stop him from injecting her in each leg. With a screech that was very nearly a bellow, she fell to the ground.

Summers fell down beside her, panting. He gathered his twitching body in his arms. To Remy's surprise, Grey didn't dust him. Instead, she clutched his neck, her breathing ragged and faint. They touched foreheads.

"Hey you," Remy heard her whisper.

"Hey yourself," said Summers. He pulled her tighter and even Remy, who thought he had no shame, felt the need to look away. 

Instead, he tallied his body parts, the bits left unhurt since that was the shorter list. His right knee felt good. He was pretty sure he still had all his teeth. Neither one of his eyeballs popped. The handgun pressed against the small of his back, cold as the grave. How long should he stall before informing Summers that he had to kill his girlfriend? For that matter, how the hell was he going to kill her with half a dozen of her best friends and two armies still going at it in the background?

The decision left his hands. Remy didn't catch that Grey said but Summers' voice increase in pitch and volume in response. "What do you mean-- For the love of mutants, you slogged through med school. For the love of our students, you stayed at Xavier's when you could've taken any position in any hospital in the world. Back in Alkali Lake, you sacrificed your life for the love of the X-Men. For love of me, you resurrected yourself. Now, for the love of the world you want toNot know love? Jean, you _are_ love!"

"If even one more person died at my hands... It's better this way. Quick. Clean. Final." She cupped his face. "I love--"

Summers reared back. " _Fuck you_!" Then he embraced her again, roughly, his face buried in her hair. "Don't you fucking do this to me again. Don't you dare! You're just sick... I love you, God damn it."

Firearms rose into the air. The one working cannon shook. Remy flipped quickly onto his knees, his eyes trained on that cannon even as he drew the gun out from behind his back. Everyone else was still fighting. They didn't notice this. He looked at Jean. Their eyes met briefly over Scott's shoulder and Remy felt the touch of fire and roses in his mind. She drew his attention to Scott then to a chunk of asphalt torn out of the ground, forming a shield. Remy nodded. Then Jean closed her eyes again.

"A part of me will always be with you, Scott," she whispered as the cannon and all the rifles pointed towards their little tableau.

"It's not enough."

Cinnamon and roses blasted Remy's senses and he leapt out of his crouch at Summers. The force pushed the other man off his feet; Remy took advance of his shock to fling him into a fireman's carry, one arm and leg trapped to keep his struggles to a minimum. Summers had to be shouting but Remy couldn't hear it 'cause a hundred rifles and a cannon went off. Heat, shrapnel and an inhuman cry blew them behind the asphalt outcropping. 

* * *

Logan told him later that he gathered five pieces of the body altogether. Remy developed a life-long revulsion to scent of cinnamon and roses.


	5. A Place to be Calling Home

Because of the fallout from Alcatraz, Remy didn't know the date until he channel-surfed through GNN. The time and date pinned the tickertape news to the bottom of the screen: May 15, 2005. He only absorbed the significance when he reached for his beer and realised the ticking sensation at his wrist was gone.

* * *

McCoy pushed his glasses onto his forehead. "I'm sorry for doubting you but yes, you do have a microchip embedded in your fascia."

"So why didn't anything happen? I'm supposed to get an alarm or something."

"It's broken. I'm surprised infection hasn't set in."

If his tracer was broken, how was he supposed to go back home?

* * *

Summers drove him to Wyoming County, back to his sphere if it was still there, if it had ever been there. To his relief, no one had moved it in the nine days since he arrived in this time. Evidently, no one could move it. Scratches at the base and near the crown revealed the attempts.

"Looks like you were telling the truth," Summers said after looking inside at the gear.

"Good. I was starting to think I'd gone--" Remy stopped himself in time.

"Psycho?" Summers filled in, his lips twisting upwards in an approximation of a smile. "So, how do you go back?"

"I don't know. My microchip was supposed to take care of everything. I just sit in there and let it happen."

"Give it a try."

On went the gear. He felt stupider wearing the helmet with an audience. He sat in the bucket seat as Summers closed the door. Then he waited. For a long time. Feeling absolutely fine.

After what felt like an hour, Remy had to get out. He unlatched the door, holding his breath as it hissed open. Summers peeked in from the side. "Did you check the batteries?"

"Fuck."

"Maybe you left the headlights on."

Remy glared. "Yuck it up, Winky."

Summers grinned. It... fit, so much more than the dour expression he'd been wearing since Remy knew him. Kind of freaky, was what it was, too.

"Why aren't you mad?" he asked Summers on the way home.

"At what?" He was genuinely puzzled.

"Me. The world. You was grizzled and pissed for half a year after you thought Jean died at Alkali Lake but less than a week after-- well, _after_ , you're cracking jokes? Should I be giving you some of that olanzepine? I'm sure we got some left over somewhere."

Summers didn't answer but Remy knew he wouldn't. He stepped over a line, a bad habit of his when he wanted pressure off himself. Talk about the other guy, make it about them instead. To his surprise, Summers had a reply for his question. 

"I already grieved for Jean all those months. Seeing her again..." He shook his head. "That last moment just before she died, she sent me everything she ever felt about me through our link. And I sent her everything back. It was... it was so goddamn _beautiful._ "

For one pants-soiling second, Remy thought Summers was going to start crying but thankfully, he manned up.

"The first time, I blamed everyone for her death, especially myself. This time, she made sure I knew it was all her disease. Nothing anyone could have done would have been able to control the Phoenix personality, not after six months without meds. Sometimes, people are just broken and there's... there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you love them." Summers let out a sigh then shook himself like a wet dog. "Uh. Sorry about that."

"Already forgot about it, hommes."

"Thanks." A couple miles later, he asked, "Are you sure you're not a little telepathic? We had a student come through once who was an empath. You couldn't help but like her."

"You hitting on me, Winky?" Remy threw him a smile, one guaranteed to fluster any heterosexual male.

Summers wasn't one inch flustered. "I'm just saying you drew a lot more out of me in this conversation than I meant to reveal. Even the professor hasn't been able to let me talk it out."

"I guess I'm just a trustworthy soul."

"I guess so." Then in another second: "Uh, you weren't hitting on me, were you? 'Cause I'm flattered --"

"Jesus!"

"-- but I'm mostly interested in women. I haven't dated men since college and you're not really my type."

"Hell no! Fuck. I hate this decade."

* * *

McCoy called in a favour from Reed Richards and Susan Storm. A dozen paparazzi followed the pair from the sphere to the school gates. In the evening, the country's entertainment news and blogs would blare about connections between mutants and the Fantastic Four but inside the school, the scientists were oblivious. They holed up in the medlab with Hank, prodding and scanning Remy for hours. At least Sue was the main geneticist. If Remy knew doctors were this pretty, he'd've gone to the hospital every day of his misbegotten life. At best, he could say McCoy's bedside manner was a hell of a lot better than Stryker's. The medlab still gave him the creeps though.

"That's the fifth vial of the stuff you got from me," he said, wiggling his fingers.

"We need enough a lot of blood to run accurate tests and more to store for time-sensitive observation." Sue swirled the contents of a full vial around. "I wish we had a sample from your first day."

"More testing for the crazy, hein?"

"My brother and best friend are astronauts, my boyfriend has a PhD in a type of theoretical physics so new it doesn't have a name yet and I turn invisible. In contrast, time travel's been an academic topic since the mid-fifties. Of course, I also expected Reed to be the one doing the travelling." She threw Richards a distracted smile. "That man has a knack for tripping into impossible phenomena. Okay, I'm done."

Richards stretched his neck from the laboratory end of the room. "What exactly did Logan and Network tell you about travellers to the future?"

"Something about the future being nonexistent to me as someone from 1993 so I can't exist in it."

"Any details on why?"

"Naw, they kept explanations stupid for their guinea pig. Wouldn't be surprised if they didn't know exactly what happened either. Seemed to me like they fly by the seat of their pants through all of it."

"Did they specify any signs and symptoms?"

Helplessly, he shrugged. "Just that it looks like Parkinson's. And it'll come in a year."

"The first manifestations will come in one year or death in one year?"

"I don't know! He was using it at a threat; I wasn't exactly writing a prescription."

"At least we have symptoms and a time frame," Sue interrupted. "We can monitor your condition while we figure out a way to fix your tracer."

* * *

To keep him busy (and out of the school's goods), Xavier paid Remy to go places where the X-Men couldn't, places that needed a little more finesse and a lot less exploding. He became the X-Men's ears in skid row, to the people who didn't trust the X-Men, Magneto or the government. He kept tabs on known sympathisers on either side of the three-way fence. He burned data on mutants at the main office of the Friends of Humanity and dropped off incriminating evidence at the desk of CNBC's Trish Tilby. He bugged the office of the new secretary of Mutant Affairs and the secretary of defence. (Xavier didn't send him to do that; he just wanted to see if he could. It was fun.)

Because of all that, he worked with Summers a lot. The guy went from whiskered and depressed to a machine which everyone seemed to take as a good thing. Only Remy, always nosy and on the lookout after that weird conversation, knew about mini-bar bottles of alcohol hidden in various crannies around the school. Hey, if it kept him going...

Rogue, Drake, Pryde, Jubilee, Sharra and Rasputin graduated in August. Drake and Pryde became roomies (likely something more) in Columbia. Sharra entered the police academy in the same city. Jubilee bought a wrecker of a car and drove out to LA to discover herself. Rasputin stayed on Xavier's salary as the handyman and art teacher. With his job description filled and Grey dead, Logan roared off campus again, leaving Rogue at the front doors clutching his dogtags in her bare hands. Remy wanted to hit him, bad as when he first showed up in New Orleans demanding access to the Island.

"Wanna go for a drive?" he asked her as soon as Logan's bike could no longer be heard.

"What for?"

"What else are you gonna do?"

They rode Rogue's Kawasaki once around the property then out into the sleepy little hamlet of Salem City then past even that. No planned direction, no real destination, just the engine eating tarmac and the horizon beckoning and Rogue soft under his hands. He didn't mind riding bitch so much in this trip.

Twilight found them in one of Pennsylvania's many mountain glades. The tree cover dissipated the humidity and decreased the temperature but surely not enough that Rogue felt cold. Still, as they sat at the base of a knotty old maple, she settled between his legs and leaned back on his chest.

"Do you have a girlfriend? Back in 1993?" she wanted to know.

Remy picked up a fallen leaf. "You could call Bella that."

"Bella. That's a pretty name."

"Belladonna Bordeaux. It's her stage name."

"You _would_ hook up with an actress," she chided.

"Actually," said Remy, "she's an exotic dancer."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Shocked that I'm shaking up with a stripper?"

"I think you want me to be shocked. What's she like?"

Shamefully, he could barely call up her face. "Blonde, legs to heaven. Her daddy's the enforcer in the city's major ganglord so she don't really need to dance. She just likes to piss him off. Wish I'd known that before I started sleeping with her, let me tell you. I think I got scared into falling for her."

Rogue laughed. "You're awful! If it was that bad, you wouldn't be so nuts about going back."

He never told her about the dying side-effect. He kind of hoped it wouldn't matter. "She's all right, really. We're a couple of crazy kids in love."

"You're not in love with her," said Rogue.

"How do you know that?"

"I've seen people in love. Mr Summers and Dr. Grey. I know how Logan felt about Dr. Grey and about his ex-fiancée in Japan. How Pete feels about Kitty. Even... even the traces of Magneto left in me, it feels something stronger than what you're describing. I'm going to fall in love like that."

"With Drake." The leaf in his hand hissed with kinetic energy.

"Bobby's practice."

"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself. It's Logan, ain't it? Every other woman with an X is throwing themselves at him. You realise he could be a thousand years old."

But she wrinkled her nose. "Ew. No. Logan's... he's crushable but he's got more baggage than even me. And I'm the person who absorbs people's baggage. I think I want to fall for someone normal for a change."

"Good luck finding that pot of gold."

"I'll just point my bike west and see what happens," she continued.

"Is that gonna be before or after you take the Cure?"

She jerked away from him, her lips all pursed and hands in fists. After glaring at him for a full minute, she got up to her feet. "Why are you so nice one minute and a complete and utter ass the next?"

Because I'm getting to comfortable here, he wanted to tell her. Because sometimes, in my head, I cal the school home. Because I'm not going to stay and I don't want to want to stay. Instead, he changed the subject. "So you head west. Then what?"

"It's not like I haven't tried to control it!" she blurted out. "I have! But it was all with Dr. Grey and she's dead now. I can't do this with the Professor; he's too... I have Charles'-- Magneto's memories of him and it sticks out too much when I practice and I can't... I'm going to be stuck in that school, in one place, forever!"

"Why do you want to leave so bad?"

She didn't answer right away. That was all right, Remy was god with patience. "I leave before they kick me out."

He knew exactly what she meant.

* * *

September, October and November rolled around. Trish Tilby's investigative team released an exposé on The Cure. Apparently, it hadn't passed even the most minimal of FDA approval; Worthington Pharmaceuticals greased some hands to bypass the testing. Rogue locked herself up in her room all day, letting only Summers in for more than a minute. Remy tried not to be hurt. Those two had a lot in common. The same month, Richards and Storm returned with something useful. Nothing practical, just useful.

"What we know of special relativity and gravitational time dilation indicates travel to the future is possible, not the past," said Richards. "However, you also mentioned a wormhole, a long-touted phenomenon in time travel theory. Using a temporal wave scanner, we made measurements on the random frequencies in space. The scanner works by--"

"For the sake of brevity, let's stick to the findings," said Xavier, much to Remy's relief. "Is travel through a wormhole possible?"

Richards beamed. "Not only possible but highly probable. If our calculations are correct, the so-called wormhole used for your travel isn't merely a hole at all. It's a multi-tiered gateway to specific intervals on the space-time continuum. It only ever opens at that location on a specific date and time. We had postulated, of course, that wormhole travel would be precise but I had not--" Someone coughed off screen, snapping Richards out of his nerd trance. "Right. Anyhow, we now know that Remy can indeed travel back and forth through time using that particular wormhole."

"So how do I do it?" asked Remy.

Here, Richards' face fell. "We... don't know. Yet."

"Don't know yet? You just said it was possible!"

"Yes but without a guidance system of some sort, who knows when you'll end up. We don't know even know how to access the wormhole; we've merely confirmed its existence. The negative energy ring you spoke of in our other meetings has quite a broad definition. As well, we don't understand the power needed to create that energy."

"Great," Remy said. "At this rate, I'm gonna be a grampa before we figure that out. If I even have that long."

"Are you feeling all right?" Sue intruded. "Do you feel any tingling at the tips of your fingers or toes? Have you been clumsier than usual lately, tripping or dropping things?"

He was about to drop a charged card at the monitor. "No."

"Your bloodwork hasn't changed. I'd like to come again and take new samples for comparison though." Sue's expression softened. "We're doing all we can, Remy. If it's in our power, we'll get you home safe."

"Fine. Whatever." Just then, a thought clicked in Remy's head. Reed Richards. Hank McCoy. He dove to the phone. "Network said the time-travel technology they used was based research by Richards and McCoy but there was a civil war of some sort. Most of their research-- your research-- got destroyed. That's why they couldn't control the travelling as well."

"I'll make multiple copies and ensure at least two of them are secure," Richards said. "If this technology is needed again, I want to ensure it won't cause harm, directly or indirectly."

"Maybe we shouldn't keep notes at all," said Sue. "It could keep anyone from abusing the power, like they did when they picked Remy up."

That sounded like a mighty fine idea to Remy but Richards looked like Sue just kicked the berries right out of his puppy. He hoped she could talk her boyfriend into her ways. He didn't trust Doomsday Logan not to pick up another sucker who'd mess up the timeline even more.

* * *

Snow fell. Rogue gathered her old self back together. She taught self-defence class for the younger kids and worked on her mental blocks with Xavier. Jubilee returned, tanned and broke. Pete left on an art scholarship to England. Logan went in and out, each visit no more than two weeks before he continued on his quest to pay for his past lives. Politicians used mutants as a tagline, good and bad. Students came, students went, the youngest still gravitated around him not that he complained. Xavier's School for the Gifted carved a niche in itself for him, so slowly and subtly that Remy, who teased meaning from every twitch, didn't notice until it was too late. He already cared. 


	6. This is How Remy Began to Die

Remy fell in love by degrees. He'd wanted Rogue from the very first time he set eyes on her; what hot-blooded, heterosexual man wouldn't? They drove around every chance they got, in one bike or two. Some days they had specific destinations: a seafood shack in Maine, a swimming hole in North Carolina, a race through Manhattan. Some days, they picked a direction by spinning a bottle on the drive way. Some trips they talked, some they didn't, some they fought, some they didn't. She brought him funny little things: Indian food recipes from the internet, albums from Dave Grohl's band, leaves gone purple instead of red. He collected sea glass to spruce up the emeralds on her bracelet, got drunk with her when she and Bobby finally officially broke up, collected postcards of interesting tourist spots for her travel journal. How could he keep from falling? Not that he admitted it, even to himself. 

Christmas day brunch, she pulled him away from the kids table with a box hidden behind her back. "I have something just for you," she said, mischief lighting her eyes.

"I see. I been a very good boy but now I think I may have to give it all up." He opened the box. In it was an oversized cupcake with lemon yellow icing and rainbow sprinkles. An unlit candle stuck out from the centre. "I don't get it."

"It's a birthday cake, silly."

"I told you, I don't got a birthday. Least ways, not one I know about."

"I know. We should celebrate it anyway." A blush tinted her cheeks.

There. Right there. Remy's whole body double-clutched.

* * *

In contrast, him, Scotty and Ro became tight in one day. The mission was in Iowa, just outside Des Moines. The target was a bunch of mutant children under the doubtful protection of a hustler. He used their skills to steal, took a quarter of the cut and leaving the rest for the kids' necessity. The Friends of Humanity got involved half a second after their arrival and it turned into a siege: cops and FoH outside, them and the kids trapped in the basement of the condemned building. Funny how a punctured lung, a bad case of claustrophobia and a dozen crying kids drew people together. Not that they'd have bowling nights or anything. But he knew those two had his back no matter what and he'd do the same. Once in a while, during the tough missions or when they lost a kid to the meanness of the world, they shared stories. The three of them grew up rough, had to grow up rough.

He even had his own training squad sometimes, the smallest kids, the energy converters or the seniors who wanted-- needed-- to learn how to fight dirty. Just one more tie to the future. Some days he hoped Richards, Sue, Network and Doomsday Logan were wrong. More than any other place, this was home.

He and Ororo cooked on the same nights, sharing a taste for spicy food. Tired of his haranguing, she ordered him to list his favourite foods then taught him to cook each dish, a different one each night. His sensitive palette, able to differentiate between organic heirloom tomatoes and hothouse hydroponics, pleased her. He became her recipe taster, much to his delight.

"You grow chicory in that garden of yours?" he asked her one uncharacteristically lazy Sunday afternoon. Coffee steamed in their mugs as they monitored the children playing basketball.

"Yes. Do you crave a salad?"

"Naw, was thinking of teaching you a little something called café au lait. Knocks anything that passes for coffee 'round here, even Summers' brew. You make it with chicory root in the grounds."

Ro's eyes brightened. "I know that coffee! I grew up on that in North Africa."

He couldn't help but laugh. "You and me, we're friends with good taste, hein? Everyone outside of New Orleans wrinkles up their nose at the idea, no matter they hadn't tasted it. Like Starbucks is any better with them damn burnt beans."

That very evening, Ororo dug two of her chicory plants up, sliced them up and took them to a local artisan coffee shop with its own roaster. She brought her treasure home, nearly cackling with glee as she ran the roots through the spice grinder. Summers, who was physically incapable of turning down a cup of coffee, joined them in their experimental pot.

"Holy fuck!" came out of fearless leader's mouth.

Remy inhaled the richness before partaking. "Yeah, that's there's real coffee."

Ororo happily nodded, sipping at her cup as Summers repeated his expletive. "Delicious, is it not?"

"I may never go back," Summers said. "Why didn't you tell me about this before?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure. I suppose for a while, talking about home was too painful. After that, it just fell by the wayside."

"Jean would've loved this."

Remy noted Ororo's stiffness. "Yes," she said, slowly. "Yes, she would have."

They sipped the rest of the pot, blissful, finding peace.

* * *

This is how Remy began to die.

He leaned over the sink to brush his teeth. Pink foam dripped from his mouth. He gargled to clear it away; he knew he got a little enthusiastic with the dental hygiene. The rinse water came out pink tinged. He rinsed again. Blood gushed from his nose.

He contemplated hiding it but Sue Storm called a couple days later. "I'm seeing something alarming in your blood samples. Have you had any symptoms?"

"Why are they alarming?" he asked.

"The blood is thinner, less viscous. It's paler as well, probably because the cell count has decreased. I'd like to take just another sample today, just to make sure it's not a storage mistake."

"I'll go there," he said. He drove a car so Rogue wouldn't hear him leave. 

Sue only took a smear of blood this time, enough for a slide which she prepped and studied as he waited. Her expression remained grave. "I want to test for neuropathies."

"Hein?"

"Your sense of touch. I want to see if it's deteriorated since our baseline measurements in May."

The good news: it was fine; the bad, it grew worse. Remy hid it until late that month when Summers caught him shaking the pins and needles from his hands. He lit a fire under Hank who took time off to work with Reed Richards. Rogue punched his chest and wouldn't talk to him until after dark, when she snuck into his room and crawled under his top blanket but over his flat sheet. Her presence cemented his decision.

"To hell with going back. I ain't going anywhere, chere. I stay with you and the school."

"Don't be stupid. You'll die."

"Ain't a guarantee I won't die when I go back. Hell, maybe I step in front of the bus the day after I go to '93. Maybe this is where I'm supposed to be."

"What part of 'you're going to die' are you not getting?" Rogue demanded, close to sobbing. "Last week, it was a nose bleed. Now it's losing sensation. It's coming on fast."

"I'd rather spend that time with you, not that lab."

"And I'd rather have you away, alive, than here and dying." She punched the closest pillow. "This is bullshit! It's not fair!"

No, it wasn't. Remy wasn't the type to rail to the fates though. He cupped the back of Rogue's head, pulling her closer, forcing her to lie on his chest. His "I love you" tangled in her hair. 

"When you go back," she started to say but Remy interrupted.

"You mean, if I get back."

"When," Rogue stated firmly. "When you go back, you have to promise to be careful. There's no point keeping you alive here if you're going to get into some idiot scheme without any other X-Men getting your back."

"Now, what fun would that be, chere?"

She propped herself up on her elbows. "You have to promise. Meet a girl, live in a picket fence--"

"Never. I wait for you."

"Oh, sugar, that's sweet but you can't be by yourself for twenty years. You'll go nuts." She tried for a smile. "Remy Jr's going to wither."

"I'll wait," he said firmly. "Unless you can't see yourself with a middle-aged horn dog."

"I love you, sugar. You'll just be a little less Chad Michael Murray and a little more George Clooney."

"Eh, byen. Never did like Chad Michael Murray."

As he grew sicker, Hank and Richards worked harder, sleeping even less than Remy himself. They updated him every other day.

"These are our findings," Hank said. "Think of space-time as a long, rough braid of rope, so wide, it resembles a sheet."

It was a familiar speech. Nausea burbled up Remy's throat.

"An event at a certain year will cause another event further down the line which will then cause another event, ad infinitum. Should one aspect of that initiating event change, a strand, if you will, splits from the braid like a bead of mercury. It can become a separate entity but ultimately, certain outcomes must occur no matter the process."

"Network said her sister could see the alternate dimensions," said Remy. "That enough alternates that end happy would make the whole timeline end happy. That's what they were trying to make with everyone going back, to make lots most happy-ending dimensions than apocalyptic ones."

Richards frowned. "Their hypothesis seems fallacious. The universe is finite; there would not be enough material to support an infinite number of realities even if they were to eventually return to the main timeline."

"So you're saying it never mattered whether or not Jean, the professor and I died; 2013 will still have a world war and global climate change," said Summers who was sitting in on this session ostensibly out of curiosity, in reality, he wanted to make sure Remy stayed upright. If that didn't depress a man, Remy didn't know what could.

Hank tilted his head to one side. "Not precisely. Change enough events and the subsequent major event may not occur immediately. A new thread is created. For example, were Remy to return to 1993 and affect our lives at the point, a new thread would form. It would cause a great deal of upheaval and I certainly do not recommend it for the sake of preserving current rates of entropy but, ultimately whether it be one year or a hundred down the line, that strand will meet with the main lines and time will correct itself; that event will occur. Remy currently lives outside that braid. As such, his body is not stable."

"As soon as I go to '93, I'll be stable again," Remy said for clarification.

"Very likely," said Richards. "But expect side effects. You've been out of your native space-time for almost a year. Your body is suffering and may continue to suffer until it has acclimatised itself back to its native clock, so to speak."

"What kind of side effects?"

"Your current weakess, perhaps some memory or cognitive dysfunctions. It's really hard to say without experimental data. We should collect these notes into a more coherent volume, Dr. McCoy. It may mean that in the not so distant future, the time travel machine would not be so crude."

"Any of those side effects lethal?"

McCoy and Richards traded looks. "Not to our knowledge. But no procedure, especially one such as this, is without a chance of lethality."

* * *

This is how Remy said good-bye.

He woke up early on March 14, 2006 and bought five bouquets of flowers for Rogue's room, turning it into a riot of colours. He cleaned his bike, leaving care and feeding instructors to Scott. He helped Ororo transfer bean shoots from pots to plots in the greenhouse. He played Monkey Ball Party for three hours with the little kids, fighting off lethargy and aches. He accepted a beer from Logan, smoked a cigar out at the pool house and extracted a promise: Rogue had to live to the ripe of age of a hundred and one. He lay with Rogue on the roof of the school, tracing the bumps of her spine, his nose buried in her hair and told her, in as much detail as possible, how he imagined the rest of their lives together.

Then, Richards called and they climbed into a car headed for Wyoming County. The sphere was in the exact same place, unmoved or unmoveable. He kept an arm around Rogue as Richards injected a much larger microchip into his right wrist this time. "If I've done this right--"

"If?" Ororo crossed her arms. "We're supposed to trust our friend with an if?"

Remy squeezed her shoulder. "Maybe go back versus for sure dead. The odds were never good."

"The chip should be calibrated to the wormhole's exit into 1993," Richards continued. "Make sure you find someone to remove it as soon as you arrive. I'm afraid none of the material we have are one hundred percent rejection proof. I would have loved to study your older chip but considering the sensitivity of--"

Sue Storm cleared her throat.

"Erm. Yes. It's on a time release. It will start searching for frequencies as soon as it interacts with the sphere's communications system." Richards patted his shoulder. "Good luck."

Good-byes were uncomfortable. Remy had never been good at them, preferring to duck away before any real emotional outbursts. Summers apparently felt the same; he stood off to one side, arms crossed, still as could be. Hank shook his hand and said a bunch of five-syllable stuff that Remy didn't, couldn't, understand right now. Ororo and Rogue hugged him tight. 

Hazmat suit, forty pound helmet, big metal sphere... Remy took one last look of home as the door slid down.


	7. Four Thousand, Seven Hundred Forty-Eight Days

The radio failed to fill the silence of the van as Rogue, Scott, Ororo and Hank returned to the school.

"Do you think he made it?" asked Scott.

"We can ask the professor to search with Cerebro," Ororo suggested.

Scott winced. "Y'know what? I'd rather not. If he doesn't find him, I'm going to get really depressed."

Rogue stared out of the window, playing with her bracelet.

The last of the snow finally melted. Cherry and apple trees bloomed in full. The petals fell, leaving tiny globes of would-be fruit. Scott boxed up Jean's things into three categories: charity, her parents, and the school. Ororo brought home a date, Jacob Forge, one of Tony Stark's top engineers. Before they knew it, summer rolled around again. Bobby and Kitty finished first semester, flush with the success of independence and new ideas for mutant-human relations on the basic level. The morning after they arrived, Rogue took an empty beer bottle, unfurled a giant map of the world and spun the bottle around. It pointed south and a touch west.

All right then.

Students crashed around her in a wave of excited flurry as she made her way from the second floor to the computer lab. She needed to make plans. She'd take her bike, of course, but she couldn't remember exactly how much money was in her back account. Budgeting the trip would make it last longer. Maybe she'd stick close to the beaches and collect more glass.

The doorbell rang. One of the students answered. "Yeah, sure, he's just in class. I can get you all something to drink while you wait in the study."

"Mais sho'. Thank you."

There. Right there. Rogue's heart froze even as her body sent her running down the hall and back out into the open foyer. A tall, lanky man in a long coat herded two children into a study. His hair was a little shorter and his face a little craggier but there was no mistaking his identity.

"Remy!" She leapt into his arms, laughing, oh Lord, she didn't think she'd ever laugh like this again! And he caught her, because he always did, a bemused smile playing on his lips. "You're okay. I was so afraid-- we all were so afraid something had gone wrong."

Gently, he let her down, an indecipherable expression on his face. Rogue's heart, which had gone from zero to pounding, dropped back down. One of the children he arrived with, the boy who looked around middle-school age, slunk into her line of sight.

"Who's that, Dad? Another ex-girlfriend?"

Dad? Ex-girlfriend? The boy looked enough like Remy but his hair tipped towards blond with a bit more of a wave. The other child was a girl, no more than seven, with a riot of chestnut ringlets and candy smudges around her mouth.

"Remy?" Rogue said again, tremulously.

"That's my name," he said. His eyes narrowed. "I'm sorry; have we met?"

* * *

This is how Remy forgot.

The sphere spat him out into a greenbelt which would, in a dozen years, become an alley between townhouses. He couldn't remove the helmet in time. He vomited down his shirt front. Smelling sour and looking worse, he had a harder time than usual charming his way into a shelter for a new set of clothes.

He knew Scott would be at Xavier's or in college right now. So close to his age. They could hang out. Maybe having a fellow orphan and former street rat would prevent a few of the growing pains Summers suffered through. A slighty pricier ticket would take him to Mississippi and Rogue and the son of a bitch uncle that touched her when her momma wasn't home. Or maybe, more desperately, he could win a few more hands and buy a ticket to Egypt where he could help Ororo out of the streets until Xavier found her. He got as far as hailing a taxi but once seated, he couldn't think.

"Hey, I said where to?" the cabbie clicked his tongue at him. "You drunk?"

"No," said Remy slowly, as wormhole theory and alternate timelines tangled in his head. "No. Take me to the airport."

"Which airport?"

"Whichever one is closest."

The calendars at the airport proclaimed the date to be May 6, 1993. Everyone wore their hair too stiff, their jeans too shapeless. The music was better but only by a small degree. Remy handed over a stolen credit card for a ticket to New Orleans, the soonest one that day. He closed his eyes as New York fell away under his plane.

A body got to thinking too much during plane trips. Remy thought of twenty long years, waiting for his friends to grow up and the smell of chicory coffee at midnight blending with lemon-oil on cherry banisters. He felt the cold ache in his arms and the tickle under his chin where Rogue would lay her head. He thought of the students-- his students-- toddlers, babies, twinkles in their parents' eyes right now, beloved until their powers catalysed in about ten years. He thought of strings made of mercury, space-time and the son of a bitch Doomsday Logan who made it possible for him to be thinking those thoughts at all. He'd go nuts thinking.

He stopped in New Orleans long enough to pack. All his life in a suitcase and a sports bag. He didn't even think of taking home a photo, not that any computers in 1993 would have an SD card slot or a USB port. He should have printed out at least one photo.

The next ticket was out to Paris, France. He couldn't do harm to the timeline there, wouldn't have the money with his gangland bridges in New Orleans burned and his cash taking its sweet time in transit. He'd miss online banking. 

His memory of time travelling fast turned to Swiss cheese. The next day, he had no idea what online banking was. The next, he barely recalled the route from Salem to the school. This had to be one of the side effects Reed and Hank postulated; he'd rather be throwing up blood. In a week, desperately, he tried to write names for the faces whipping through his memories but in another seven days, he had no idea why he had a list of strangers in his wallet. He was lonely without knowing why. 

Bella found him there a couple months later, drunk on insomnia and forced cheer, winning almost every poker game in every casino the City of Lights threw at him. They indulged in a truly explosive session of sex-with-the-ex helped by a magnum or three of champagne brut. Under the influence, marriage seemed like an excellent idea.

His first child came screaming into the world nine months later. Remy held him, trembling, not knowing why he recalled a classroom in a huge atrium, the feel of roofing tiles under his back and the roar of a jet engine. The boy looked up at him with eyes that glowed in sunlight.

"He's perfect," Remy whispered. He held him close to his heart, where the mysterious empty coolness lay.

"He better be after nine months of indigestion and ten hours of labour," said Bella. She tickled his pointed ear. "Isn't that funny? We've got an elf baby. A changeling. I was thinking Leon."

Remy shook his head. "Jean-Marie."

His wife wrinkled her nose. "That's so old fashioned even for France! If we move back to the States, he'll be teased for having a girl's name. At least make it, Jean-Paul or Jean-Claude. Jean-Leon."

But Remy was adamant. "His name's Jean-Marie."

"Are you naming him after someone?"

Cinnamon and roses mingled in his mind with lemon oil and chicory coffee but he couldn't quite grasp the memory. "No. I just... I just really like the name."

They stayed together for all of four years but separate lives got in the way and a divorce was expensive so it didn't become official for another three. By that time, Bella got pregnant again; what _was_ it about fertility and sex-with-the-ex? He begged and pleaded and threatened and bribed her to keep the baby but it wasn't until he held that a sweet little girl that his tension dissolved. As soon as Bella signed the divorce and custody papers, Remy took seven year-old Jean-Marie and baby Aurora Summer back home to the USA.

They settled in Seattle. Remy trained under the best hackers in the business. Computers owned the whole damn planet and he might as well have a piece of it. He still did plenty of B&E's; there really was nothing like a good con. One those business trips, his kids stayed with a neighbour, an old woman they called Tante Mattie. He dated, even contemplated living with one girlfriend, but a bone-deep certainty had settled in him: he'd never find happily ever after in this life. Not with his lifestyle. Meantime, he had a tonne of fun with the ones who wouldn't make it.

Remy was content, rolling along like the proverbial rolling stone until a couple weeks after Jay's birthday when the whole world suffered a telepathic attack. Soon after waking, the boy slammed a fist on the table. Blinding white light flashed under his hand. Remy covered his eyes. Aurora wailed at the unfairness of a world that gave her daddy and big brother a mutant power and not her.

"Let me see your hands," Remy said immediately. When his powers first catalysed, he kept a hold of the pencil and it burned his fingertips. But Jay's hands were unhurt, thank God, and the boy was more shocked than scared.

"Why isn't it purple?" Jay asked. "You charge things purple."

"You still gotta learn style." Remy winked and laughed when his son rolled his eyes. Still, worry turned his stomach over. His kids were his world; he had to find a way to protect them from something like that. He sent feelers out.

A year later, he heard tell of a mutant school in New York. It was called Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The image on the brochure of an ivy-covered manor pulled at his gut. His fingers honest-go-God trembled and he almost recalled... something. _The_ something that occurred before the loneliness of Paris. But like Seattle's morning fogs, it disappeared without solidifying, leaving nothing but a sense of security. They'd fly out that weekend. The school looked like a good home.


End file.
